Thirty years ago a Benevolent Giant strode the world stage, raising up, we are told, the spirits of Americans and making us feel all warm and wonderful about ourselves again. He played a key role in giving us the world we have today.
So today in the nation's Capitol a bronze statue to the Great Man was unveiled in the rotunda, with appropriately hagiographic paeans being sung to his holy memory. And just yesterday, kicking off preparations to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Great Man, President Obama said, ""President Reagan helped as much as any president to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended politics -- that transcended even the most heated arguments of the day,... It was this optimism that the American people sorely needed during a difficult period."
In the reverent spirit of remembrance of the nation's 40th president, I offer these brief recollections of one very small part of the rushing river of his legacy:
Ordinary people, El Salvador, 1981:
Six American Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter, courtesy of School of the Americas graduates of the Atlacatl Battalion:
And from the NY Times, January 21, 1990:
For years we have been told that U.S. training would improve human rights behavior by creating a more disciplined, professional army. Yet in 1981, the [Atlacatl] battalion massacred 700 peasants in El Mozote. In 1983, it killed dozens of villagers from Tanancingo and Copapayo. In 1984, it slaughtered 68 in the hamlet of Los Llanitos and 50 at the Gualsinga River. Last summer, it joined Salvador's First Brigade in torturing two young men who later died. Now it has slain six priests and two women.
Reagan's enthusiastic, active support for the death-squad dictatorship of El Salvador and his illegal creation and support of the Nicaraguan Contras who wrought terror there were a big part of who he was but only a tiny part of his overall legacy. Such was his infectious sunny optimism, his American can-do spirit.
I respect Obama's impulse to bipartisanship, but I, for one, did not feel optimism during the reign of Reagan, nor do I cherish his memory in any way. He set the course of America in a steep decline from which it is questionable whether we can recover.